Shinjiro Watanabe’s Work

It's difficult to put Shinjiro Watanabe into words; we had no idea what to expect when we accepted him into our program.

His statement simply said: "My [artistic] goal is to move from a human-centered way of thinking toward a living spirituality of life. I hope to draw out the growing nature of people, their transformation into truly living beings." His curiosity drew him to the mountains; for in the solitude of extreme conditions we can touch the truth of our life.

His portfolio is filled with amusing mysteries. A giant palm tree is paraded through the city on the back of a car, only to be displayed as a work of art. A video documents crowds of people boarding the Yamanote Line carrying potted plants, filling the car with vegetation. In a performance, the artist sits beside a houseplant in a room, the sounds of him solemnly watering it transformed using sound equipment.

The film unfolds slowly; a man seems to be controlled by the plant, communicating with it. As I watched, mesmerized, I wondered what he could see differently through that plant. How would such an artist, used to placing plants in lifeless urban settings, engage the surroundings of Kumonodaira already covered by plants?

His photographs of plant life around the Kumonodaira caught us off guard. As familiar as we were with the setting, he captured something truly universal and very beautiful. One evening he left the lodge and wandered through the night into the surrounding primeval forests, to the Kurobe headwaters, all the way to Takamagahara, capturing the signs of life in the darkness of the night. The silhouettes of plants and trees, hints of rock and water: and the entire darkness is so far removed from the world we see during the day, yet always there, pulsating in unison to engulf us. So much is always happening beyond our awareness!

He found exactly what he wanted to confirm. Shinjiro seeks to pierce the fiction of "meaning" and approach the fearful awe of being itself. Whether this is actually art or philosophy is not quite clear, but he is trying to draw near to the truth. This activity itself is his art.

（Text：Jiro Ito　Photo：Yuki Morita、Kenji Akasabi　Edit：Kenji Akasabi）